/lit/ - Literature

>>17513361
>foundation of modern psychology
I thought he was.

>>17513361
The foundation of modern psychology is more so Abraham Maslow than Freud.

>>17513361
But then I couldn't use my semitic hocus-pocus to not have to argue with chuds and handwave away everyone who doesn't agree with me as sexually repressed! That just wouldn't be right!

>>17513411
Everyday this site proves Freud correct, this anon is clearly a repressed homosexual

>Truth conceptually necessitates an agent with preferences
he's right

>>17513425
What did he mean by this

>>17513543
>if it can make no practical difference which of two
statements be true, then they are really one statement in two verbal
forms; if it can make no practical difference whether a given statement
be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning
http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/5117
the concept of truth only makes sense in the context of people pursuing goals, who care about things and have values that are causing different outcomes to yield different utilities. in other words, the idea of truth depends on the idea of purpose.

fuck off pragmatist bugman

>>17513665
oops, the first four lines should be quoted. the last part after the link is my comment on it.

>>17513670
pragmatism is based

>>17513670
If pragmatism is cringe what is based according to you?

>>17513361
psychoanalysis =/= psychology

>>17513361
redpill me on radical empiricism

>>17513361
He was too boring. Frued and Hegel are intellectually sexy.

>>17513361
There's no difference, pragmatism is ultimately a form of idealism that makes reality dependent on us.

>>17514705
Nope

>>17514705

That's what Hegel would say, but then again he kind of went mad around the idea of not having any choice other than idealism

>>17513361
Correct, really should have been
James -> Brentano -> Husserl -> Merleau-Ponty
instead of the genitalia-obsessed bullshit we got instead.

>>17515817
and Whitehead

>>17515865

Never even tried reading him. I thought he was a logicbro, what does he have to say about psychology?

>>17513361
based

>>17515885
he was a philosopher. he was not a logicbro. he turned to metaphysics late in life. was very much influenced by william james.

>>17513361
Freud isn't the foundation of modern psychology. Psychoanalysis and psychology developed largely independently from each other.

bump

>foundation of modern philosophy
>Hegel, not Frege

What the hell am I reading?

>>17513401
>look at the hierarchy of needs
>it's totally true
based Yid

>>17513361
Why wasn't he, then?

>>17513361
>William James should have been the foundation of modern psychology instead of Freud
Freud should be delegated to the dustbin of history to begin with.

>>17516845
>Hi, Freud, I'm too busy to empty the dustbin of history at the moment, can you do it for me? Thanks

>>17516859
Kek

>>17513361
>William James should have been the foundation of modern psychology
He is. Freud is only relevant to humanities phd students desperate for a thesis nowadays.

>>17516859
relegated you boob

maybe skelegated if you mean murdered by Cruz missiles

>>17515817
BASED PHENOMENOLOGIST

>>17513543
>>17513665
>It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition is an occasion of experience is its interest, and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one. Also action in accordance with the emotional lure of a proposition is more apt to be successful if the proposition be true. And apart from action, the contemplation of truth has an interest of its own. But, after all this explanation and qualification, it remains true that the importance of a proposition lie in its interest.

>>17516944
This is a quote from Whitehead but it's pretty much in perfect agreement with "Truth conceptually necessitates an agent with preferences."

>>17513361
Can't really comment on the value of his insights but the style of The Principles of Psychology is top notch, James was a very gifted writer.

>>17516944
i don't get it

>>17516944
>>17517097
>Whitehead does not seem to think that the problem of error is of great importance. Indeed, he takes what most philosophers would consider a cavalier, indeed irresponsible, attitude towards the whole question. For he holds that ‘in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true’ (PR 259). A scientific observation, a common-sense hypothesis, or even a rigorous philosophical formulation may have relevant and important consequences despite the fact that it is erroneous. For this reason, Whitehead is less concerned with eliminating error than with experimenting with it, and seeing what might arise from it. Error is not an evil to be exterminated, but a frequently useful ‘lure for feeling’ (PR 25 and passim). It is a productive detour in the pathways of mental life: ‘We must not, however, judge too severely of error. In the initial stages of mental progress, error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom’ (S 19).

>It is worth underlining how rare this position is in Western philosophy. It may well be a cliché of educational method (a subject in which Whitehead himself was deeply interested) that making mistakes is a necessary part of learning. But most philosophers overlook this. They are more concerned with the nature and content of truth than they are with the question of how we may learn to attain it. Deleuze is the only other major philosopher I know who joins Whitehead in regarding the problem of error as in itself merely trivial.

>Western philosophy in general is preoccupied with the question of error because it is deeply concerned with the unreliability of immediate experience – or of the body and the senses. From Plato’s allegory of the cave, through Descartes’ radical doubt about the evidence provided by his physical organs, right on up to Thomas Metzinger’s claim that experience is nothing but an internal, virtualreality simulation, philosophers have been haunted by the idea that sense-perception is delusional – and that, as a result, our beliefs about the world might well be radically wrong.

>>17517073
Is Principles of Psychology worth reading or is it too outdated?

>>17515817
p based ngl
Who would be the heirs of Merleau-Ponty today?

>>17517231
>It is
Nice take, discovery is indeed born from error. We should not be so hasty to judge past thinkers according to whether they where right or not, instead we should act what they taught their contemporaries, and what they can still teach us.

I wouldn't say the problem of error is trivial because some errors are catastrophic and can be averted with enough care, but certainly the error-averse mindset is often limiting (not to mention it doesn't reliably lead to the most correct insights).

>>17513361
He wasn't jewish enough

>>17517469
*we should ask
Time to stop posting, I'm drunk.

>>17517409
I don't know much about psychology but his prose is mesmerizing. Here's a passage that I like:

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shop,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

>>17515761
The idea that pragmatism is a linguistic form of idealism is well-attested to. And self-proclaimed pragmatists in recent decades have turned to Hegel for inspiration probably for this very reason (Brandom and McDowell).

>>17513361
James, like Freud, were trained as physicians. At a certain point Freud and James were on the same track, namely, physiological psychology. Some of Freud's early work was on a physiological theory of the brain, but he abandoned the project because he thought that the science was too underdeveloped at the time.

James took a similar turn, interested in comparative psychology and noting shared reflexes between animals and humans such as the startle response and sketching a very early form of behavioral neuroscience.

Where they departed is that James continued along this mechanistic line of thinking, stepping out into purely "psychical" phenomena occasionally with the idea of stream of consciousness etc. He was more interested in an early form of behaviorism.

Freud went off and viewed the mind as a clinical object, while James viewed it as a descriptive object.

>>17514055
>Y-Y-YOUR IDEAS HAVE TO BE INTERESTING A-A-AND CHALLENGING AND SEXY, BRO TRUTH DOESN'T MATTER BRO, ESPECIALLY IF IT ISN'T INTERESTING B-B-BROOO

>>17517620
I think he was lamenting that this was the popular response, not validating it.

>>17517681
Big if true

>>17517097
The point of knowledge is for the agent to reach it's goals. Knowledge that helps the agent do this is useful wether it corresponds to external reality or not, but knowledge that corresponds to external reality does tend to be useful to the agent insofar as it is related to the agent's goals.

In other words: inteligence is a tool to solve problems and what constitutes a problem is observer-dependant.

William James' pragmatism is the most Darwinian epistemology, imo.

Heidegger calling American pragmatism cheap

>>17517571
And Marx and Marxists were inspired by Hegel while being materialists so what's your point? Hegel wasn't even seen as an idealist in his time. Deleuze turned to the pragmatists for inspiration while being a materialist also.

>>17518391
Hegel literally spends time calling his view idealist in the Science of Logic. He is not a subjective idealist though which actually means, if you want to know the crazy truth, that Hegel is less idealist than James. Crazy.

Pragmatism is hard to get your head around because it seems to be like a kind of "if it works, it works" philosophy, applied to epistemology. But that's not quite it. The most interesting strain of pragmatism is certainly William James, who was actually neglected in favour of Dewey for a good time.

Husserl once said of James that he was the seed of an entire native American phenomenological movement if only America had been ready for that movement. Deleuze has been compared to James. All in all, James is an unusually, almost bizarrely prescient philosophy of immanence. James even outdoes phenomenology in certain ways (IMHO, anyway) by bracketing, in a Wittgensteinian fashion, transcendental speculation in his philosophical psychology. He seems to intuitively understand that we don't understand much about the mind OTHER THAN ITS SUCCESSFUL AND CONTINUOUS CONNECTION/RE-CONNECTION TO REALITY. Like Deleuze and Wittgenstein, James makes a very strong effort to understand thought based on what we can say with reasonable confidence that it "does."

James' pragmatism is a little like this: The mind exists only insofar as it is INVOLVED in reality, invested in reality. When he talks about "cashing out" an epistemic assumption or belief about the world, he doesn't mean in a vulgar utilitarian sense of "does this confer some social benefit?" He means: Was the collective life of mind furthered by this belief? Did this belief terminate in something fruitful?

The key point of James' pragmatism to understand is that ALL movement is forward movement. Beliefs are guesses and hunches about reality. They can be wrong (i.e., they can "cash out" in a firm "no"), but if they drove mind/culture until that moment, then they drove it FORWARD. Not to venture, not to believe, is nonsensical. It is the nature of mind to have an incomplete understanding of the world and therefore to venture a more complete understanding in everything it undertakes. The "pragmatic" value of the present incompleteness of knowledge is in this perpetual futurity, progressiveness, and openness. Whatever the human mind is, and it definitely seems to be incredibly complex, it is bound up in reality, it CARES about the world, it is intrinsically pragmatic.

This is very different from Peirce's pragmatic principle and quite different from Dewey's pragmatism. Though Peirce is very brilliant on his own terms, just not concerned with the same thing as James.

>>17518614
This sounds very interesting anon, thanks. How well do you know the analytic neo-pragmatists by any chance? And thoughts on how they differ from James, Peirce, Dewey?

>>17518614
>an entire native American phenomenological movement if only America had been ready for that movement. Deleuze has been compared to James. All in all, James is an unusually, almost bizarrely prescient philosophy of immanence.
There is something of a criss-crossed genealogy from Bergson to James to Bergson to Deleuze so that makes sense. James is also a bit more amenable to Spinozist or Vedantist pantheism because of the transcendentalist influence while Bergson is more critical of absolutes, and of course Deleuze has his bit about "buggering" other philosophers in his monographic works, which naturally cover Spinoza and Bergson

>>17518614
>if it works, it works
If it works it's true. I've always seen the validity of the pragmatist criterion of truth express through scientific engineering rather than logical arguments. It's a form of proof my demonstration expressed over an empirical domain.

The construction of the large hadron collider to run experimental physics tests plainly demonstrates some knowlege, embodies some truth, or else the thing would fly to pieces or not do what was predicted.

James and Peirce, especially Peirce, always intended for the idea to be applied in this way. Granted, James thought it could be applied to unprovable metaphysical beliefs like free will or belief in God. But then idiots like Rorty came in. muddled up the idea completely and made it seem as if it was anything goes.

>>17518614
I think I'm going to love reading James. Thanks for your effortpost anon.

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>>17513361
He would've been more respected and influential if he was English, rather than English-American.

Bump

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>>17513389
me too, but I guess we're both idiots

bump

>>17513361
Freud founded psychoanalysis, not psychology. Psychoanalysis is a set of techniques for treating mental illness.

bump

>>17515817
Absolutely based. I would also add Peirce to this list (the greatest American philosopher of all time), and perhaps Whitehead >>17515865 as well, although his philosophy of organism is too metaphysical to properly fit that trajectory.
The arrows can also be continued to the present day via the school of embodied cognition: Varela, Noe, Andy Clark, Dreyfus, Evan Thompson, who combine the insights of Merleau-Ponty with contemporary developments in the cognitive sciences.

>>17517435
See >>17522102

>>17522102
Thoughts on Bateson

>>17517500
>It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.


>tfw 28 and still a lazy NEET coomer

>>17518160
Heidegger is the Judas Iscariot of modern philosophy. He betrayed his teacher (Husserl) and every bad thing, including deconstructionism, can be traced back to him.

>>17523004
He opened Pandora's box because he knew monsters are for slaying, not locking away.

>>17513361
When you suddenly realise its the job of the 21th century to remove most Jewish, progressive and degenerate authors and replace them with better, but lesser know White authors.

>>17513421
Freudianism is a tool the Jew uses to corrupt society.

>>17523646
>but lesser know White authors.
you guys are the #1 fucking embarrassment our race has

>>17513421
Your mom's a repressed homosexual.

>>17522331
His psychiatry hasn't aged well, but I still consider him a great ecological thinker. I'd place him more in the lineage of cybernetics than phenomenology (although the two disciplines do converge with Varela).

Everything is Semiotics. Peirce's semiotics not S**ss*re's.

>>17525167
When people tell me Peirce wasn't a pragmatist the way James and Dewey are, I just think about his infinite semiosis and his rejection of intuition. How isn't that the same sort of language-bound (thought-bound, belief-bound, whatever--the point is we're stuck inside representational symbols bouncing off each other forever and can't reach outside them) idealism as the others? Maybe you can help me explain.

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>>17523296
he had no idea what bullshit he was unleashing. he was just a naive guy (like most "philosophers") who got caught up in the fads of the time.

>>17525628
>>17526204
instead of just writing "bump" ask a question or contribute someway, at least minimally

>>17526388
I don't think so at all, the fad at the time certainly wasn't a return to the pre-Socratic in the belief that the entirety of western philosophy up until that point wasn't merely asking the wrong questions, but didn't even know what to ask.

>>17526419
>the fad at the time certainly wasn't a return to the pre-Socratic in the belief that the entirety of western philosophy up until that point wasn't merely asking the wrong questions
abandoning the project of philosophy, i.e. the project begun by Plato in favor of something sexier-looking certainly was a fad then and especially now. this is what drove Husserl nearly to despair; nobody wanted to hold the line and trust in the plan of the Aufklärung that was so close to its final fruition. instead we got historicism, scientism, relativism and every other defeatist heresy that intellectually ruined the 20th century and the present one.

Heidegger may have been the last great philosopher, but he was the last one for a reason: he killed the seriousness of the subject and turned it into a sort of interpretive dance or modern art project. Just think of how little respect scientists have for philosophy nowadays.

>>17513401
this. most modern psychology seems to be rooted in the humanist movement.

>>17513421
kek

bump

Bump

>"psychologist"
>not researching the Soul
trash

Peirce > Ramsey > James >Dewey

Bump